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Switcher Hangout (Windows to Mac)
Conflicted Switcher
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<blockquote data-quote="Zoolook" data-source="post: 715620" data-attributes="member: 21101"><p>What really is going to have a material affect on your machine? </p><p></p><p>Firstly Video RAM was mentioned, as in 'is 512MB enough'. For 2D applications, no more than a quarter of this will ever be used on a MBP screen, and perhaps half of this used if you're powering 2 external monitors. For 3D applications and games, this may be different, but no one has mentioned this so far.</p><p></p><p>In terms of real-world performance, the difference between a 7,200rpm and 5,400rpm drive, on a laptop, is about 20% in the most favorable conditions (highly fragmented files, with multiple read-write functions) and perhaps less than 5% is the worst conditions (continuous reads on large block files).</p><p></p><p>Just to demonstrate this fully:</p><p></p><p>An average 5,400 drive will have a seek time of 5.5 msecs (that's how long it takes to find a file) and a read speed of 540Mbits/sec.</p><p></p><p>An average 7,200 drive will have a seek time of 4.2 msecs and a read speed of 695 MBits/sec.</p><p></p><p>To put this into perspective, the 7,200 rpm drive would have to search for almost 800 files, to gain even a single second on the slower drive, and if you're saving a 2 GB file would be 23 seconds vs 29 seconds, or 7% faster. The smaller the file, the less likely there is to be a difference.</p><p></p><p>Now for audio performance, this does matter, because if you have 16 tracks kicking off at the same time, with a 20 msec latency allowance, suddenly this becomes important. Are you likely to notice the difference? Possibly, but you'll need a stopwatch to catch it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Zoolook, post: 715620, member: 21101"] What really is going to have a material affect on your machine? Firstly Video RAM was mentioned, as in 'is 512MB enough'. For 2D applications, no more than a quarter of this will ever be used on a MBP screen, and perhaps half of this used if you're powering 2 external monitors. For 3D applications and games, this may be different, but no one has mentioned this so far. In terms of real-world performance, the difference between a 7,200rpm and 5,400rpm drive, on a laptop, is about 20% in the most favorable conditions (highly fragmented files, with multiple read-write functions) and perhaps less than 5% is the worst conditions (continuous reads on large block files). Just to demonstrate this fully: An average 5,400 drive will have a seek time of 5.5 msecs (that's how long it takes to find a file) and a read speed of 540Mbits/sec. An average 7,200 drive will have a seek time of 4.2 msecs and a read speed of 695 MBits/sec. To put this into perspective, the 7,200 rpm drive would have to search for almost 800 files, to gain even a single second on the slower drive, and if you're saving a 2 GB file would be 23 seconds vs 29 seconds, or 7% faster. The smaller the file, the less likely there is to be a difference. Now for audio performance, this does matter, because if you have 16 tracks kicking off at the same time, with a 20 msec latency allowance, suddenly this becomes important. Are you likely to notice the difference? Possibly, but you'll need a stopwatch to catch it. [/QUOTE]
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